Far Country, a — Volume 1 eBook

It was true to my father’s character that he
should have waited until the day after graduation
to discuss my future, if discussion be the proper
word. The next evening at supper he informed me
that he wished to talk to me in the sitting-room,
whither I followed him with a sinking heart. He
seated himself at his desk, and sat for a moment gazing
at me with a curious and benumbing expression, and
then the blow fell.

“Hugh, I have spoken to your Cousin Robert Breck
about you, and he has kindly consented to give you
a trial.”

“To give me a trial, sir!” I exclaimed.

“To employ you at a small but reasonable salary.”

I could find no words to express my dismay. My
dreams had come to this, that I was to be made a clerk
in a grocery store! The fact that it was a wholesale
grocery store was little consolation.

“But father,” I faltered, “I don’t
want to go into business.”

“Ah!” The sharpness of the exclamation
might have betrayed to me the pain in which he was,
but he recovered himself instantly. And I could
see nothing but an inexorable justice closing in on
me mechanically; a blind justice, in its inability
to read my soul. “The time to have decided
that,” he declared, “was some years ago,
my son. I have given you the best schooling a
boy can have, and you have not shown the least appreciation
of your advantages. I do not enjoy saying this,
Hugh, but in spite of all my efforts and of those
of your mother, you have remained undeveloped and
irresponsible. My hope, as you know, was to have
made you a professional man, a lawyer, and to take
you into my office. My father and grandfather
were professional men before me. But you are wholly
lacking in ambition.”

And I had burned with it all my life!

“I have ambition,” I cried, the tears
forcing themselves to my eyes.

“Ambition—­for what, my son?”

I hesitated. How could I tell him that my longings
to do something, to be somebody in the world were
never more keen than at that moment? Matthew
Arnold had not then written his definition of God as
the stream of tendency by which we fulfil the laws
of our being; and my father, at any rate, would not
have acquiesced in the definition. Dimly but passionately
I felt then, as I had always felt, that I had a mission
to perform, a service to do which ultimately would
be revealed to me. But the hopelessness of explaining
this took on, now, the proportions of a tragedy.
And I could only gaze at him.

“What kind of ambition, Hugh?” he repeated
sadly.

“I—­I have sometimes thought I could
write, sir, if I had a chance. I like it better
than anything else. I—­I have tried
it. And if I could only go to college—­”